My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

I use Cursor by asking it exactly what I want and how I want it. By default, Cursor has access to the files I open, and it can reference other files using grep or by running specific commands. It can edit files.

It performs well in a fairly large codebase, mainly because I don’t let it write everything. I carefully designed the architecture and chose the patterns I wanted to follow. I also wrote a significant portion of the initial codebase myself and created detailed style guides for my teammates.

As a result, Cursor (or you can say models you selecting because cursor is just a router for commercial models) handles small, focused tasks quite well. I also review every piece of code it generates. It's particularly good at writing tests, which saves me time.

Neither of these is accurate, but I guess nuanced thinking or considering anything below surface vibes is out these days.

So far after playing with them I'm using them as:

1. A junior intern that can google really really fast and has memorized a large chunk of the Internet and the library, and can do rough first-pass research and dig for things.

2. Autocomplete 2.0 that can now generate things like boilerplate or fairly pedestrian unit tests.

3. Rubber duck debugging where the rubber duck talks back.

4. A helper to explain code, at least for a first pass. I can highlight a huge piece of code and ask it to summarize and then explain and walk me through it and it does a passable job. It doesn't get everything right but as long as you know that, it's a good way to break things down and get into it.

For those things it's pretty good, and it's definitely a lot of fun to play with.

I expect that it will get better. I don't expect it to replace programmers for anything but the most boring mindless tasks (the ones I hate doing), but I expect it to continue to become more and more useful as super-autocomplete and all the other things I listed.

Computer science was an immensely fun subject to learn. I moved to one of the big cities and was bewildered with how much there was to learn, and loved every second of it. I gradually became good enough to help anyone with almost anything, and spent lots of my free time digging deeper and learning.

I liked CS and programming - but I did not like products built by the companies where I was good enough to be employed. These were just unfortunate annoyances that allowed me to work close enough to what I actually enjoyed, which was just code, and the computer.

Before LLMs, those like me could find a place within most companies - the person you don't go to for fast features, but for weird bugs or other things that the more product-minded people weren't interested in. There was still, however, an uncomfortable tension. And now that tension is even greater. I do not use an LLM to write all my code, because I enjoy doing things myself. If I do not have that joy, then it will be immensely difficult for me to continue the career I have already invested so much time in. If I could go back in time and choose another field I would - but since that's not possible, I don't understand why it's so hard for people to have empathy for people like me. I would never have gone down this path if I knew that one day, my hard-earned-knowledge would become so much less valuable, and I'd be forced to delegate the only part of the job I enjoyed to the computer itself.

So Thomas, maybe your AI skeptic friends aren't nuts, they just have different priorities. I realize that my priorities are at odds for the companies I work for. I am just tightly gripping the last days that I can get by doing this job the way that I enjoy doing it.